Julianne Moore's Sarah-dipity

The chief reason to see Game Change (HBO, Saturday March 10th) is that it’s fun. It has nothing new or profound to say about the runaway train of a presidential campaign, it doesn’t have paint any rainy moments of a candidate’s somber reflection on the toll of his soul as the an aide prattles on the latest polls, it doesn’t peel any of the crab shell off of John McCain for a look under the psychological hood, or show us a side of Sarah Palin that will send us to the rewrite pages of history. It doesn’t drip oil from the ceiling like Ides of March, implicating everyone including the audience in collusion and corruption. It’s a slow-burn comedy of exasperation, finally blossoming into cursing frustration when Palin, the rock-star treatment from her rabid fans pumping her up into believing that she’s bigger than the campaign, wants to make her own concession speech the night of the losing election. It leads to an exchange in the hotel corridor between an unfortunate delegate from the Palin camp and Steve Schmidt, the senior campaign strategist who had lobbied for Palin on the ticket, only to rue his counsel.

--Steve, is the governor giving a concession speech tonight?

Schmidt: I’ve said this five times already. She is not giving a speech.

--Well, she seems to think otherwise.

Schmidt: Well, she’s not.

--Whaddya want me to tell her?

Schmidt: Tell her she’s NOT FUCKING SPEAKING.

--Well, you both seem pretty certain.

Schmidt: My certain supersedes her certainty. God damn it!

And off he steams.

The bullet-headed Schmidt is played by Woody Harrelson, whose affability as an actor never loses a low simmer underneath, capable of boiling up into mean-eyed anger in films like Natural Born Killers and Rampart; his grin always has something else going on with it. Ed Harris is convincing and appealing as McCain, though more paternal and less agitated than the real item, who never seems to have met a bombing campaign he couldn’t back. Great seeing Jamey Sheridan as Mark Salter--he’s an actor much missed since leaving Law and Order: Criminal Intent.

The hell on high heels is of course Julianne Moore’s Sarah Palin, which never laxes into Tina Fey caricature (one of the film’s tarter scenes is Moore’s Palin beadily watching Fey mock her on Saturday Night Live) and brings the warrior princess of this relative neophyte to the fore. Physically, psychologically, sartorially, she’s very tightly packed; a butt-propelled torpedo. The glare of Palin’s determination and disapproval gleam through the windshield of her eyeglasses and her smile wouldn’t never been mistaken for affection. (O the icy edge of her queen-bee disdain when she thanks Levi, the impregnator of daughter Bristol, for cutting his mullet. Joan Crawford couldn’t have delivered the sentiment better.) Her confidence and self-containment are impregnable, unstoppable, even when she’s obviously in over her head and can barely rub two facts together to fake her way through. One of the key scenes is when Palin is coached for her vice-presidential debate, the staff trying to cram as much information as possible into the bare warehouse of her worldly knowledge, and she rebels by staring at her cell phone, texting away and ignoring everything said to her. She no longer resembles a grownup woman; she’s a petulant teenager refusing to do her homework. And yet she is shown capable of summoning the focus and poise to hold her own with Joe Biden, so it isn’t that she lacks the intellectual firepower to understand the issues; it’s just that she doesn’t care. The stuff that interests her is the only stuff she’s interested in, and that’s why she hasn’t shown any greater depth or grasp of issues in her many Fox News appearances since 2008. She transmits and receives on that narrow bandwidth of the right that can’t/won’t think beyond Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Sean Hannity. The difference between the Sarah Palin of Game Change and Meryl Streep’s Margaret Thatcher is of mental rigor and discipline; Thatcher drilled down on the issues that mattered to her, until the details pebbled her brain. The only discipline Palin reveals as a politician is that of “staying on message.” And she can’t even do that when the message clashes with what she wants, hence her going rogue during the McCain campaign. Letting zeal do the talking for her, Palin can’t help but spew word salads because she never gets her details in marching order, mobilized for argument. She just starts flyswatting away.

Well, it hardly matters now. Palin’s political future seems like a chimera in her fans’ eyes. Like Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, the Palin of Game Change has had her moment on the stage; Palin’s was but a flash, but now it’s gone, and she too seems like a historical figure in her own time.